...and they're off! The 2018 domain sales season
is now underway with sales reports from the first week of the new
year now in. It is always good to get off on the right foot and
broker Sharjil
Saleem, assisted by Ali
Rajpoot, made sure than happened by closing a $220,000
sale of DXB.com that heads our first weekly all extension Top
20 Sales Chart of 2018. With that Sharjil picks up where he left
off in 2017, a year in which he had three of the 12 biggest
sales reported, including #2 (tie) ETH.com at $2
million.

Sedo filled the opening week's runner-up
slot with their $75,000 sale of Publica.com in a deal
closed by their Senior Broker Dave Evanson. They went on to
sweep 14 of the 22 chart entries (the extra spots resulted from a
three-way tie for the final position) including #4 Mega-Sena.com
at $35,000 and #5 (tie) Block-Chain.com at $30,000.

The new gTLDs also got off to a
good start with Michael
Berkens selling Talk.show for $50,000.
Michael had reported the sale on his Twitter feed (@thedomains)
Monday but did not release the price as he had accepted a non
disclosure agreement with the buyer, Roberto Bourgonjen from
Amsterdam, Holland. Bourgonjen apparently changed his mind
though because today he replied to Michael's tweet by saying the
price paid was $50,000. Roberto added that his first offer
(in May 2017) was $5,000 and he went on to tell Michael that he
should have accepted the advice he said he made at the time - take
the $5,000 and put in Ripple cryptocurrency. Bourgonjen
said that amount would be worth $197,000 today. Of course,
hindsight is 20/20 and everyone seems to be happy in the end.
Bourgonjen said he will make good use of the domain as well as his
cryptocurrency gains.

By
Ron Jackson

Talk.show was one of two non .com gTLDs
to make the Big Board. The other wasFlippa's
$30,000 sale of #5 (tie) Homes.net. Flippa, who released
their top sales for 4Q-2017 for the first time today, wound up with
five spots on the elite list.

The ccTLDs also took two places on
the leader board with #17 TraumJob.de at $9,600 at #18
CMR.co at $9,449. Sedo posted both of those
sales.

Everything else went to the .coms
who piled up 18 of 22 entries overall. DomainsNext.com
helped the .com cause with their $20,000 sale of #8 (tie) B91.com.
That was one of three 3-character .coms to make the Top 20, along
with a pair of 3-letter .coms. For newcomers, 3-character .coms
include a mix of letters and numbers. They were overlooked for many
years but the continually growing demand for ultra-short .com
domains has increased their value dramatically in recent
years.

Here is how the sales leaders
stacked up for the week ending Sunday, January 7, 2018: